Abstract
This paper proposes an unsupervised tumour segmentation approach for PET data. The method computes the volumes of interest (VOIs) with sub-voxel precision by considering the limited image resolution and partial volume effects. First, an improved anisotropic diffusion filter is used to remove image noise. A hierarchical local and global intensity active surface modelling scheme is then applied to segment VOIs, followed by an alpha matting step to further refine the segmentation boundary. The proposed method is validated on real PET images of head-and-neck cancer patients with ground truth provided by human experts, as well as custom-designed phantom PET images with objective ground truth. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous automatic approaches in terms of segmentation accuracy.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 1530-1544 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Computers in Biology and Medicine |
Volume | 43 |
Issue number | 10 |
Early online date | 06 Aug 2013 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 01 Oct 2013 |
Keywords
- Positron emission tomography
- Tumour segmentation
- Active surface modelling
- Alpha matting
- Mutual information